The present invention relates to a method of delivering a telephone number associated with a telephone subscription.
It also relates to telephone sets, in particular mobile telephones that implement the method.
All telephone users have at some time or another found themselves in the situation where they do not know or they have forgotten the number of the telephone they are using. The simple and usual way of solving this problem is to label a telephone with a telephone number. However, that solution takes it for granted that a given telephone set is capable of being associated with one telephone number. Unfortunately, that solution is not acceptable with mobile telephones e.g. of the kind operating in the context of the new pan-European mobile telephone standard known as GSM (Global Service for Mobile communication). Under such circumstances, the concept of xe2x80x9ctelephone numberxe2x80x9d is no longer directly associated with the equipment, but with the subscriber. All of the data relating to a subscriber is contained in a special module that is held by the subscriber. Within the GSM standard, the data relating to a subscriber is contained in a subscriber identity module (SIM) in the form of a smart card that the subscriber inserts into the mobile radiotelephone. This module is essential for making use of a radiotelephone, and it is issued to a subscriber when a subscription is taken out for a GSM mobile telephone network.
The data contained in the SIM module include directories of numbers, messages, a personal identification code number (PIN) that the subscriber must key in when initializing use of a mobile telephone, and subscriber identification data for use by the network. It should be observed that none of this identity data bears any relationship with the telephone number of the subscriber. The utility operating a fixed or mobile telephone network is capable of establishing the correspondence between a subscriber identification number and a telephone number by using data contained in data bases of the network that are not accessible to the user. Thus, at present, there is no way of identifying and supplying a radiotelephone with the telephone number of its user.
The object of the present invention is to remedy the above drawback by proposing a method of delivering a telephone number associated with a telephone subscription to a user using a telephone set in the context of said subscription, use of said set requiring the user to provide said set with subscription identification data stored in a data medium held by the owner of said subscription and co-operating with said telephone equipment.
According to the method of the invention, the telephone number is previously stored in the data medium and is transferred into the telephone set at the request of the user, to be delivered to the user of said set.
Thus, the user of a telephone set can discover the telephone number of the subscription associated with said telephone set without it being necessary to label a telephone number on said set, thus making it possible for the set to be completely interchangeable and independent of any particular subscription, as is the case of a mobile telephone in a GSM network.
According to another aspect of the invention, there is provided a telephone set including control and processing means, display means, and interface means for co-operating with a data medium independent of said telephone set and including subscription identification data, the telephone set implementing the method of the invention, and wherein a memory location is provided within said data medium to receive the telephone number corresponding to said subscription, and wherein the control and processing means are organized to control transfer of said telephone number from the data medium into the telephone set and to display it via said display means.